This was a cute little story, but nothing in comparison to even a single chapter of any of the ASoIaF books. Granted, this was geared more toward kids, but it wasn't very engaging. I think my son was bored with it after the first few chapters (which was really fine since I read it to him until he fell asleep each night). The first two thirds of the book are really character development. But because the book was geared toward children and the main character was also a child the development was very limited. Then in the last third of the book there's actually a bit of plot development, but I felt like it was rushed just to come to a quick conclusion to keep the book kids' length. Given another 50-100 pages I think this could have been a really nice short novel. Typical for GRRM books, there were dragons, battles (although mostly just alluded to except for the final battle), and several deaths. My son is almost 5 and I toned down a few spots and the main character is 7. The story would probably be good for a 7-9 year old, but the vocabulary in the story is probably geared toward a 10-12 year old level (particularly the use of medieval terms). So there might be a disconnect between the target audience and the story. And I think my biggest issue with the novel was the extremely long, run on sentences that filled the pages. Several times I stopped to re-read what I had just read and make sure that I hadn't missed a line or a phrase that had the end of the previous sentence. GRRM makes liberal use of the word 'and' in this book.

In all I'm glad I read this because now I've read something by GRRM other than ASoIaF, but if this is typical of his writing style for other stories I'm very disappointed. However my son was very happy that he could have a story by the same guy that wrote my Dance with Dragons book and our Game of Thrones TV show, which he wasn't (obviously) allowed to watch.